The operation canâ€™t be completed because you donâ€™t have permission to access some of the items

I decided to make the topic the error message, since it’s what people often are searching for when experiencing a problem :-).

Problem scenario: You’ve downloaded a file from t3h intranetz on your Snow Leopard MacBook, and opens the file (possibly a PDF or DMG file) using the Mac. Then you try to copy the file to your SMB/CIFS network share (Samba/Synology/QNap/ReadyNAS/{your NAS device here}), but get the following dreaded and dumbfounding error message:

The operation canâ€™t be completed because you donâ€™t have permission to access some of the items.

The problem here, is that the file has been modified by OSX. Now, after having been tampered with by your Mac, the file contains more attributes, which you can display using the ‘xattr {file}’ command in a terminal window. A file with extended permissions might look like this: